The conventional wisdom in Washington and beyond is that Bashar al-Assad will fall on his own and that an intervention would be counterproductive, but with thousands dying we need to reconsider those assumptions

A Syrian protester faces security forces near Homs / Reuters

The most stunning thing about how American foreign
policy experts and elites talk about Syria today is the one aspect of
the country's crisis that they won't discuss. There is little to no
actual debate about direct international intervention into an uprising
and crackdown that has cost more than 5,000 Syrian lives. In response to
the Bashar al-Assad regime's violence against largely peaceful
protesters, which leaves dozens of people dead every day, the
international community has denounced Damascus "in the strongest
possible terms," as diplomats like to say, placed the country and its
leadership under sanction, and searched for additional punitive measures
short of the use of force. Oddly, at the same time that the United
States, Europe, and the Arab League have apparently rejected meeting
Bashar al-Assad's violence with violence, there is an assumption in
Washington that it is only a matter of time before the Syrian regime
falls. It is largely a self-serving hunch that does not necessarily
conform to what is actually happening in Syria, but nevertheless
provides cover for doing nothing to protect people who are at the mercy
of a government intent on using brutality to re-establish its authority.
After all, if the many Syrians who have been in open revolt since March
of last year are on the verge of bringing down Assad, then, as the
conventional wisdom has it, there is no need for a international
response and thus no need for an agonizing debate about whether to use
force in Syria. But this logic seems less convincing every day, and it
might be time to reconsider our assumptions about intervention.

If the world wants to see the end of Assad, it will
likely require international intervention

Despite
the now prevailing belief in policy circles that it's only a matter of
time until Assad falls, events in Syria suggest otherwise. Since last
March, thousands upon thousands of Syrians have taken to the streets,
initially to demand reform and now the end of the Assad regime, which
they clearly regard as unredeemable. Syrians have been willing to face
down a fearsome army and security forces that were created, trained, and
equipped not for war with Israel but for repression. The economic power
of the United States, European Union, and Turkey (The European Union
and Turkey had previously accounted for almost 30 percent of Syria's
trade) have applied what was hoped would be crippling sanctions on
Assad. There is evidence that these measures have created a range of
problems for Syria, including spikes in food and energy prices. Still,
sanctions have failed to modify the regime's approach to the uprising.
Indeed, the Syrian leadership has long shown that it is more than
willing to force its people to suffer in order to ensure the regime's
survival.

Syrians are persisting in the face of regime violence
and there have been defections from the armed forces. Yet only a small
number of officers and recruits have switched sides: the anti-regime
Free Syrian Army apparently numbers only a few hundred. Unlike in
Tunisia or Egypt during the revolutions there, it seems that Syria's
military officers still believe that sticking with Assad best serves
their interests. Even the recent terrorist attacks in Damascus,
against high-value targets such as the State Security Directorate and
the Kfar Sousa district military office, do not appear to have not
altered the regime's strategy. Indeed, Assad vowed to use an iron fist
against the perpetrators of the attacks, which the opposition believes
was actually committed by the regime seeking an excuse -- as if it
needed one -- to use force against the uprising.

It's
true that Assad is more isolated than ever, but to what effect? The
Turks, who, over the course of the last decade, tried to convince the
world that the Syrian leader could be flipped through engagement and
trade, have given up on him. Even the Arab League, long a club for
dictators, suspended Syria's membership. It was one thing when the
organization kicked out Qaddafi's Libya, but quite another to take
similar action against the country that is "the beating heart" of the
Arab world, as Syria is sometimes known. Despite the international
opprobrium heaped upon Damascus and efforts to isolate the regime, Assad
continues to have options. Tehran, Moscow, Beijing, and Hizballah all
remain committed to their relationships with Damascus.

Ultimately,
it seems that Assad still has bullets left, people to resupply him when
his stocks run low, and loyal officers to fire them. What more does he
really need? Under what circumstances is Assad's fall "only a matter of
when and not if," as the foreign policy comminity seems to have decided?
The Syrian leader may, in fact, be under pressure, but he also clearly
believes that he has time. In his speech to the Syrian people on January
10, he gave no hint that he believes he has a political problem on his
hands. That may be posturing for public and international consumption,
but unlike earlier speeches Assad did not even bother to promise hollow
reforms. He has gone all in, apparently believing that he can continue
to kill people with relative impunity. Current international efforts are
exacting a toll, but it is clear that Assad and his associates -- his
family, actually -- are willing pay a much higher price for their
survival.

If Assad is indeed more secure than the conventional
view suggests, then the inevitable question is whether it is time to
consider more "robust" responses to the Syrian regime's outrages. Much
of the commentary thus far has focused on why hypothetical interventions
-- Operation Unified Protector: Syrian Edition or Lift and Strike Damascus
-- would be bad ideas. Opponents of international intervention argue
that the Syrian opposition has not asked for such action, but their
non-consent could be changing, given what living (or not) at the mercy
of the Assad regime looks like. The opponents also claim that
intervention in Syria is likely to be harder than it was in Libya. On a
technical level, the argument is specious. There is nothing in the
Syrian arsenal that would pose an undefeatable threat to Western
aircrews. That's not to suggest that undertaking military action in
Syria would be a "cakewalk," but relatively recent Israeli incursions
into Syrian airspace suggest that in terms of force protection, the
risks are minimal. The technical issue is, however, a red herring.
Analysts who reject the idea of airstrikes suggest that it could
actually do more harm than good, giving Assad an excuse to kill even
more people. It is a compelling argument and certainly a downside risk,
but what is constraining the Syrian leadership now? Nothing. And, what
is the metric that flips the cost-benefit analysis? In other words, at
what point in the body count is international intervention deemed to be
an acceptably worthwhile option that can have a positive effect on the
situation? After Assad has killed 6,000 people? 7,000? 10, 000? 20,000?

The
other major objection to taking direct action against Assad is Iraq.
There are two versions of this claim. The first indicates that the
experience of Iraq was so searing and the impact on Iraq's neighbors so
devastating, that the United States should not repeat the same mistakes
now. But why did this claim have so little sway when it came to Libya?
Post-Qaddafi Libya is far from perfect and its future is uncertain, but
the intervention was nowhere near at costly or destabilizing as the 2003
Iraq invasion. Regardless, it seems that when it comes to Syria, the
Obama administration has learned the lessons of Iraq. For example, in
contrast to the George W. Bush administration's march to war in 2002 and
2003, Washington has worked particularly hard to be mindful of regional
security concerns, particularly Turkey's, in Syria.

There are
actually few analogies to the Iraq experience. Unlike Saddam at the time
of the invasion, Assad is engaged in the mass killing of his own
people; unlike Operation Iraqi Freedom, there is a chance that the Arab
League would support a humanitarian intervention in Syria, and any
military operations could be undertaken multilaterally. Getting a UN
Security Council resolution would be tough given Chinese and especially
Russian opposition, but without being too Rumsfeldian, does every
military intervention require a UN writ? It is certainly preferable, but
not a requirement.

MORE ON SYRIA

Would Syria really be so different from
Libya? This is big question that the opponents of intervention in Syria
have not effectively answered. European leaders, "right to protect"
advocates, members of Congress, and a bevy of foreign policy
intellectuals (with a few notable exceptions) seemed willing to unleash
NATO on Qaddafi on humanitarian grounds, but not on Assad. If NATO
undertook a military attacks to protect Benghazi from an onslaught, what
about Homs? At this point, Assad has killed more people than Qadhafi
had on the eve of NATO operations. The truth is that the arguments
against bombing Syria run into the Libya buzz saw no matter how often
people insist that "Syria is not Libya." One of the real reasons that
observers seem reluctant to consider an intervention in Syria may be
because Libya took so long to bring Qaddafi down, which was the unstated
but unmistakable goal of NATO's missions. It was supposed to be a
matter of weeks, not seven months. Had Qaddafi fallen last April, it's
easy to see how the same political pressure that contributed to Libya's
intervention could have shifted to demand the same approach in Syria.

The
arguments for some sort of lift-and-strike-like policy toward Syria are
not without their problems. There are good reasons that contemplating
yet more Western violence against yet another Muslim country can (and
maybe should) bring a certain queasiness. That said, if the
international community wants to see the end of the Assad regime, as
virtually everyone claims, then it is likely going to require outside
intervention. Nothing that anyone has thrown at Damascus has altered its
behavior and the current arguments against intervention do not hold up
under scrutiny. If there is no intervention and political will to stop
Assad's crimes remains absent, the world will once again have to answer
for standing on the sidelines of a mass murder. It is also hard to
ignore the possibility that bringing down Assad would advance the
long-standing American goal of isolating Iran. Any post-Assad government
in Damascus would not likely look to Iran for support, but instead to
Turkey and Saudi Arabia. That would be a net benefit for Washington and
others looking to limit Iran's influence in the Arab world.

The
wild card in the bomb-Syria-for-humanitarian-reasons argument is what
post-Assad Syria might actually look like. Syria has similar ethnic and
sectarian complexities as Lebanon and Iraq and there is reason to
believe that, in the vicissitudes of politics, these groups might seek
to settle scores against one another and to gain advantage through
violence. Then again, it is worth asking whether analysts are
over-correcting as a result of the American experience in Iraq. Given
recent history there, it certainly seems that caution is warranted, but
that means leaving Syrians to their fate with a regime which seems
intent on shooting and torturing its way out of its present troubles.

Syria
has become a place where violence, colonial legacies, the mistakes of
the recent past, and the hopes for a better Middle East have collided to
create layers of complications and unsettling trade-offs for
policymakers and outside observers. Yet wrapping oneself in the false
comfort that Assad cannot hang on for long seems like the worst possible
way to proceed. Washington and the rest of the international community
must come to grips with the idea of intervention in Syria or get used to
the idea that Bashar al-Assad could stick around far longer than anyone
expects.

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